• @djmarcone
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    11 year ago

    A digital cable that meets spec can’t be made better by gold plating or other bling. But a sub spec cable or a cable with some aspect degraded by damage or wear or contamination will introduce errors that will force the system to use whatever error correction is built in(such as with tcpip) that will hinder data speed. So, you can have a digital cable that works slower than spec but still “works”. Especially when you are running any sort of significant distance or there is noise such as fromn ac power.

    My point is that even with digital connections a better cable can make a difference. Just on the low end not the high end.

    • @havokdj
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      11 year ago

      Oh yes most definitely. Thank you for clarifying and I 100% agree with that. I have had to deal with that first hand as I work as a network administrator and have had cheap “Cat6” cabling come and be wired right, but used aluminum which not only hindered the speeds but actually made the cable run HOT (probably fine in air but a fire hazard in a wall, this was plenum too).

      Bad cable quality is for sure going to hinder performance, but yes, a $1000 gold HDMI cable (scam to begin with because gold wiring isn’t even that expensive) is silly. Funny because that cable is actually worse than standard HDMI cables now because of the current spec (think that $1000 cable was like 1.4 or something)

      • @djmarcone
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        11 year ago

        A very informative video on Linus tech tips where they ran a cable tester on lots of different cables. Super interesting.

        I always tell people to get the full solid copper core cat6, no stranded, no copper clad.

        At least for the important projects.